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Florida GOP legislators blast Tampa officials who met with Cuban ambassador

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Florida GOP legislators blast Tampa officials who met with Cuban ambassador

Mar 27, 2023 | 1:56 pm ET
By Mitch Perry
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Florida GOP legislators blast Tampa officials who met with Cuban ambassador
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Hillsborough County GOP House Rep. Danny Alvarez in front of the old Florida Historic Capitol in Tallahassee on March 27, 2023 (photo credit: Mitch Perry)

A group of Florida Republican lawmakers, several of them Cuban-American, held a news conference in front of the old Florida Historic Capitol steps on Monday to announce that they are supporting a resolution in the state Senate condemning the Cuban government and three elected officials in Hillsborough County who met earlier this month with Lianys Torres Rivera, Cuba’s ambassador to the United States.

Florida GOP legislators blast Tampa officials who met with Cuban ambassador
Cuban Ambassador Lianys Torres Rivera. Credit: Twitter page

On March 3, Torres Rivera was dining at a Tampa eatery with some members of the Tampa Bay area business and political community when a group of Cuban dissidents crashed the dinner and began protesting, with the footage captured on cellphone video.

Two of those men who disrupted that event — 84-year-old Roberto Pizano, a prisoner for 18 years under the late Fidel Castro, and his son, Rafael Pizano Jr., 42 — appeared at the press conference in Tallahassee on Monday.

“It’s disappointing, and as an American and a son of a Cuban, it’s disgusting,” Hillsborough County House Rep. Danny Alvarez said about the officials who met with the Cuban ambassador. “You were wrong, you should be ashamed, and if you had anything to do with this, you should apologize.”

“We here in the free state of Florida have nothing to gain from meeting with the leadership of that totalitarian regime. End of story,” said Tampa GOP state Sen. Jay Collins, who has filed the resolution (SR 1728) calling out the elected officials who appeared at the event.

One of the organizers of the dinner was Tampa attorney Ron Christaldi, who, as the head of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce during the 2010s, led and organized multiple trips to Havana, Cuba to establish business connections with the government, a process that was taking place around the era when then President Barack Obama was reestablishing U.S. – Cuban diplomatic relations. Christaldi did not return a request for comment.

The resolution starts this way: “A resolution condemning the tyrannical Cuban government and the Tampa City Council member and Hillsborough County officials who, on March 3, 2023, entertained the Cuban ambassador and other Cuban officials at a dinner meeting in Tampa in complete disregard of the brutality of the Cuban regime and the blood that has been shed by those who rose up in opposition.”

It calls out the three locally elected officials in Tampa for appearing with the Cuban ambassador: Tampa City Councilmember Guido Maniscalco, Hillsborough Clerk of the Court Cindy Stuart and Hillsborough County School Board member Karen Perez.

“My involvement at a recent non-partisan, educational dinner, organized by local leaders, where the Cuban Ambassador to the U.S. was present, was to learn,” Stuart told the Phoenix in a written statement. “As an elected official, I attend many small and large non-partisan events and community gatherings. One of the responsibilities of my office is to seek an understanding of complex issues and stay informed about topics that may affect Hillsborough County’s diverse constituency. Anything else that may be said or inferred is simply distortion and misleading.”

Maniscalco, whose mother and grandparents fled Cuba in 1961, said that the invitation to the event was with the “Charge d’affair” from Cuba, and that he actually had no idea that he was attending a meeting with the Cuban ambassador. He said he left before the dinner portion of the event took place.

Perez did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While most of the Cuban exile community in Miami remains opposed to ending the 60-year-plus economic embargo against the island, Tampa leaders began working over a decade ago to establish ties between the two regions.  Among the leaders in that effort has been Tampa Democratic U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, who in 2013 called for an end to the sanctions and then visited the country.

Those efforts all were ended, however, after Donald Trump won the White House in 2016. Trump imposed bans on travel and financial transactions, and also put the communist nation back on the State Department’s list of countries that sponsor terrorism, along with Iran, North Korea and Syria.

Castor told the Phoenix in a phone interview that she was proud to be part of the effort to press for reforms in Cuba to help connect families and build greater human rights and religious protections as well as boost the small business sector in the past decade – but she says things have changed.

“Unfortunately, in the intervening years the Cuban government has become even more repressive and so my view has definitely changed from a time of being able to work with the Cuban government,” she said. “They just have turned their backs on their people, especially what happened with the Cuban government repressive response to the July 11, 2021 protests on the island and subsequent detention of hundreds of protestors. It really dampened a new chapter in this bilateral relationship.”

As a Hillsborough County resident, Rep. Alvarez said that he was well aware of the push by Castor, members of the Tampa City Council and parts of the Tampa business community to establish ties with the Cuban government, but believes that it has always been inappropriate for them to do so.

“Miami told them ‘we ain’t doin’ it here,’ so they thought the path of least resistance was Tampa. And for years, they got away with it, they got away with a little nest of influence going on there, trying to make relations,” Alvarez said. “You don’t need a relationship with folks who are on the five worst nation terror list that the U.S. has declared. You don’t do it. If you want to do relations, that’s what we have a State Department for, and the state of Florida doesn’t need to be weighing in on those types of things.”

The Biden administration announced last year that it was reinstating the Cuba Family Reunification Parole Program, as well as authorizing commercial and charter flights to locations beyond Havana. The administration also announced that they were reinstating group people-to-people educational travel under a general license.